My personal experience has been that many of the engineers most in favor of flatland management are in fact most in need of good managers themselves.
One of the biggest challenges for flatland-style organizations is getting technical people to focus on business objectives which tend to be non-fun. For software that includes fixing a lot of hard bugs and really delivering on features like complete documentation, monitoring, and good upgrades.
(Disclaimer: I have been a manager about 2/3 of the time in my last few jobs. I'm an engineer currently.)
One of the biggest challenges for flatland-style organizations is getting technical people to focus on business objectives which tend to be non-fun. For software that includes fixing a lot of hard bugs and really delivering on features like complete documentation, monitoring, and good upgrades.
(Disclaimer: I have been a manager about 2/3 of the time in my last few jobs. I'm an engineer currently.)